To My Readers: Thank You for Your Interest

Thanks for the interest, especially those of you who follow from locales outside the "Great White North".  I hope I am able to provide you with both a Canadian view of events across the country and around the world, as well as a selection of articles I have found to be interesting.  Please feel free to e-mail me with any thoughts or comments, and I always enjoy reading comments on the various posts.  And, if you can (safely?), add the location you're posting from.

Thanks again,

James Phieffer

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Gabriel Latner: How Canada can force China’s hands on human rights | Full Comment | National Post

By Gabriel Latner - from the National Post

In his victory speech, Prime Minister Harper spoke of making Canada “truly strong and free”, and the “best country in the world, but always striving to be better.” It makes for nice rhetoric, but if the Prime Minister truly believes in freedom, and its pre-eminence in Canada’s culture, he will publicly demand China release Dr. Wang Bingzhang.

Wang Binghzhang represents the kind of immigrant Canada’s successes have been built on. He studied hard at McGill, eventually earning a PhD in pathology — all while raising a family. Dr. Wang is dedicated to the Canadian values of freedom, democracy and peace. According to his daughter, it was this dedication that lead him to try bring these values to his native land of China. He co-founded the International Pro-Chinese Democracy Movement, and played a key role in organizing the Tienanmen Square protests in 1989. For these actions, he is hated by the Chinese government. That raises the question over how much China can truly claim to respect Canada — it treats our values as threats to its own existence.

When Dr. Wang was in Vietnam in 2002, China “disappeared” him — they sent a team to kidnap him and take him to China, where he was held secretly for months. When Dr. Wang’s family finally found out where he was, the news only got worse. Dr. Wang had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment — without any evidence or witnesses to condemn him. He is currently in solitary confinement. All this for the “crime” of preaching the merits of democracy and human rights, the birthrights of all Canadians.

So far, Canada’s official response has been lacking. In 2003, a parliamentary standing committee submitted a report, noting that the standing committee — not even Parliament — “Calls upon the Chinese Government to release Dr. Wang Bingzhang from prison, and permit him to be reunited with his family and colleagues.” Nothing further has been said in the eight years since.

Read more...

Gabriel Latner: How Canada can force China’s hands on human rights | Full Comment | National Post

Libby Davies as a Minister in a Layton government?

    Tim Powers published an article today in the Globe and Mail speculating on who might be in the cabinet if Jack Layton were to form a government.  I just about choked when he mentioned Libby Davies as Minister of Foreign Affairs.  This is, after all the NDP MP who demonstrated a remarkable ignorance of history when she stated that the Israel has been occupying Palestinian territories since 1948 (the year Israel came into existence) and that "it’s the longest occupation in history".  She was caught on video making these comments at an anti-Israeli government protest in Vancouver on June 5, 2010.


    Now, were Ms. Davies to have checked her history, she would have found the Israeli military didn't move into the West Bank and Gaza until 1967, as a result of an imminent threat of attack by Jordan, Egypt and Syria.  So, for example, Tibet, which has been occupied by communist China since 1950, has been occupied far longer.  In history, other longer occupations include the German annexation of Alsace-Moselle (from 1871-1918), the Russian (Soviet) occupation of the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia)(1940-1991, broken by the German occupation of the area from 1941-1944), and the Allied occupation of Berlin (1945-1990).


    She also would have found that from 1948-1967 the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied by Jordan. 


    The key point here is that, for all that Jack Layton wants to show his party as being ready to lead, this is a party which has not yet shown itself to be "a government in waiting".  Had a member of the Liberal or Conservative caucus displayed such blatant bias against the existence of the state of Israel, along with a ridiculous lack of knowledge in the areas of history and geo-politics (and an apparent unawareness of the existence of Wikipedia, where she could have checked her facts before embarrassing herself), said member would have at the very least been publicly admonished and demoted by the leader of their party.


   
Instead, the only member of her party to call her out was Thomas Mulcair, who earned the enmity of other NDP MPs and supporters for his efforts.  And the question also must be asked - was Jack Layton's refusal to remove her from the post of deputy leader (a position she holds to this day) a sign of tacit agreement on his part with her basic views (if not her blundered exposition of same)?  Is an NDP government one which would take the side of Palestinian radicals (aka Hamas) against Israel, for all the talk of "even-handedness"?


    The fundamental question the voter is led to is this:


Is the NDP under Jack Layton fit or competent to lead Canada as Prime Minister?  The evidence says not.

China’s train wreck - The Washington Post

By Associated Press - from the Washington Post

For the past eight years, Liu Zhijun was one of the most influential people in China. As minister of railways, Liu ran China’s $300 billion high-speed rail project. U.S., European and Japanese contractors jostled for a piece of the business while foreign journalists gushed over China’s latest high-tech marvel.

Today, Liu Zhijun is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. On Feb. 25, he was fired for “severe violations of discipline” — code for embezzling tens of millions of dollars. Seems his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.

Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.

Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.

Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states. Read more

China’s train wreck - The Washington Post

Robert Fulford: Mao outmurdered Hitler and Stalin combined | Full Comment | National Post

Yet the most recent analysis of Chinese sources indicates that the crimes of both Hitler and Stalin were surpassed, to a hideous degree, by Mao.

Frank Dikötter’s highly credible book, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 takes readers into the darkest corner of the Mao era, when he was attempting to reorganize Chinese society from the top. Beijing directed the central planning of everything from fertilizers to steel production, according to the theories of ignoramuses who were loyal communists. It now seems obvious that Mao’s beloved project became the worst man-made disaster in human history.

Robert Fulford: Mao outmurdered Hitler and Stalin combined | Full Comment | National Post